And all the time the first principles of ethics would refuse to be killed in the mind, and would continue to bear witness against the waste of existence and the diversion of life from its true end.
Rational principles of aesthetics belong very intimately to the education of women.

Their ideas of beauty, their taste in art, influence very powerfully their own lives and those of others, and may transfigure many things which are otherwise liable to fall into the commonplace and the vulgar.

If woman's taste is trained to choose the best, it upholds a standard which may save a generation from decadence.

This concerns the beautiful and the fitting in all things where the power of art makes itself felt as "the expression of an ideal in a concrete work capable of producing an impression and attaching the beholder to that ideal which it presents for admiration." [1--Cardinal Mercier, "General Metaphysics," Part iv., Ch.

iv.] It touches on all questions of taste, not only in the fine arts but in fiction, and furniture, and dress, and all the minor arts of life and adaptation of human skill to the external conditions of living.